What My Forties Taught Me About Hard Decisions

My six-year-old took my finger, placed it next to my nose, and said: “Mommy, smell the flowers. Now blow the candle.”

She was trying to calm me down. With a breathing exercise she learned at school. She started doing this when she was four.

I am turning forty-eight in a couple of days. And like every year, I take my birthday as an opportunity to reflect. This one is particularly emotional. People say your forties are your prime years. But I have spent most of mine fighting for what’s right. It has been almost five years since allegations against four of my studies were made. It has been almost three since I made the decision to stand up and fight to right a wrong through the courts.

I think often about that decision. I grew up in a small Italian town where disagreements were settled over dinner, not through lawyers. So it is hard, and more than a little ironic, to be in a position where there is no dialogue. Just a lot of back and forth with many lawyers involved.

But the bigger reflection is a different one… when I think about the decision I made, I know it in my heart to be right. I would not have been able to look at myself in the mirror knowing that I did not do everything in my power to fight for truth.

What I think about more, what sits with me on nights when sleep won’t come, is the cost of that decision on the people I love most.

The weight others carry

I used to teach decision-making with a certain confidence that many important decisions, when you break them down, are relatively clear. There is a right path, and you take it. What I’ve learned in the last five years is that decisions come with tradeoffs that are almost impossible to weigh in the moment you’re making them. The costs reveal themselves slowly, over months and years, in ways you couldn’t have predicted.

My husband has carried this with me from the beginning. If you’re familiar with the Hogan assessment, I have an adjustment score in the nineties, which means I do well under stress, though in full transparency, my mind went into very dark places more often than I’d like to admit. My husband is different. He feels things. He’s more on the anxious side. And I have watched this process put years on him that he will never get back.

He has a theory about me. He says I am the type of person who takes on something enormous, charges in with full conviction, and then at some point realizes that the thing is even bigger and more demanding than I imagined. And then, somehow, through sheer stubbornness and hard work, I find my way to the other end of it. He says this with love, but also with the exhaustion of someone who has watched it happen many times.

He did not sign up to be married to a person engaged in multi-year federal litigation. He signed up to be married to an Italian woman who always seems to stay positive about things and talks too much about behavioral science at dinner parties. I owe him a big upgrade.

There is a particular kind of pain in seeing the person you love most bearing weight that isn’t theirs to carry, because you made a choice they supported but didn’t choose.

I think of my four children, and how often they saw tears in my eyes. They asked, “are you ok?” way too often. And then there is the image I opened this post with: my youngest, placing my finger next to my nose and walking me through a breathing exercise. She is six. She should not have to calm her mother down.

I tried to manage. But I sometimes had a short fuse, the kind that comes from carrying too much for too long. I wasn’t always the parent I wanted to be. I care so much, but the reserves were running low.

Is the pain I’ve put my family through worth it, weighed against my stubborn principles? I hope the answer is yes. But I sometimes wonder whether it wasn’t.

The people who show up

One thing I have learned -- truly learned, not intellectually but in my bones -- is that you cannot predict who will show up for you when the ground gives way. And you cannot fully understand, until you’ve been there, how much it means when someone does.

I think of Larry Lessig. A Harvard Law professor with more demands on his time than almost anyone I know, and one of the most brilliant legal minds of his generation. He went public to defend me. He spent endless hours advising me, writing an appeal, and recording a podcast that methodically presents the evidence. He did not have to. He did it because he believed it was the right thing to do. He gave me hope in moments when I had none.

I think of Ava: not her real name, but the name Larry uses for her on the podcast, because she cannot be publicly identified. Ava is the data and forensic expert who went through the evidence line by line, file by file. The kind of work she did is invisible to most people. It is technical and thankless. She spent countless hours analyzing data, metadata, and digital records to show what actually happened and what didn’t. Without someone willing to go that deep, the arguments Larry makes on the podcast would have no ground to stand on. Ava gave that ground.

I think of Bill Ackman, who also has his hands full with a hundred consequential projects. He gave me the resources to fight when I had exhausted my own. He said to me, simply: “I believe in you.” If you have never been in a position where the world has described you as something you are not, you may not understand the power of those four words. When you are drowning and everyone else is calling you a monster, someone saying “I believe in you” is a lifeline. He told me to focus on progress, a simple mantra I kept close as I went through ups and downs. I think of his counsel, who approached my case and the funding process with both smarts and real humanity.

I think of the lawyers who took on my complex, consuming case and who have fought alongside me with a determination I did not expect and will not forget. My grandfather was a lawyer. My mother has a law degree. I grew up understanding that fighting for what is right is rarely simple, and never fast. I did not fully appreciate, until now, that it also requires someone willing to fight with you.

I think of close friends who told me that even if my title changed, my competence and my ability to do what I love had not, and gave me an opportunity to do just that. I think of those who held me with unbelievable kindness, when my energy was not that upbeat. I bet none of them truly understand how they kept me afloat. How their reaching out, arriving on the right moment, can be the difference between getting up and not.

What I’ve learned about decisions

I used to think that resilience was mostly an individual quality. That some people handle stress well and others don’t. That’s true, I still believe that. But what I’ve come to understand is that resilience is relational. I did not survive the last five years because I am strong. Sure: my adjustment score helped. But I survived this messy moment because some really special people showed up. Because Larry spent his weekends making sense of the evidence. Because Ava went through the data with an open mind, and incredible attention to details. Because Bill answered an email asking for help. Because my close friends taught me what genuine friendship is all about. Because my now six-year-old told me to smell the flowers. Because my kids showed enormous patience. Because my husband held on even when holding on was costing him more than I could see.

I have thoughts on what it means to love something that no longer loves you back. But that is a reflection for another day.

The answer to “what have you learned?” is more personal than people expect: I’ve learned that the decisions that truly matter are the ones where you can’t see the full cost. And I’ve learned that the people who show up for you in those moments (without being asked, without knowing how long it will last, without any guarantee that it will turn out well) are the only thing that makes the cost bearable.

I am turning forty-eight. My forties didn’t look the way I imagined they would. But as I sit here, looking at the people around me -- the ones who stayed, the ones who showed up, the ones who believed -- I realize that what kept me going in these years, however painful the process, may be more meaningful than anything I had before.

To everyone who has carried a piece of this with me: I see you. And I am grateful beyond what words can hold.